On a small and magical plane where an all-powerful wizard feared the power of the planeswalkers, realm hopping gods who could not be challenged by less than an entire plane of warriors and only killed by another of their own, a great artifact was crafted.
The Blackshard was a vessel of infinite capacity, filled to the brim with void. It was the center of a massive diagram that pulled any planeswalkers entering the plane into its innards. If anyone tried to intrude into the plane, they would end up in an infinite empty void nearly identical to the blind eternities.
Fuelling this artifact and the ritual around it took massive amounts of magic. So the wizard set it upon the crossroads of two of the largest leylines in the realm, a volcano that rose above the atmosphere. It would hold for a while, but the leylines would wither their magic, and the realm was destabilized. Red and Green mana subsided slowly, and the wizard knew that he had to bring stability in order to protect the world.
He moved the other three leylines, a terribly slow and agonizing effort, especially difficult as so many mages and druids and shamans and clerics and other spellcasters of the realm did not wish for the leylines to be drained. Their war was great and terrible, and the plane suffered further for it. Artifacts of this war still linger under the moss 3000 years later.
But the wizard had won. He forced the white leyline into the crossroads with his dying energy, and it was entwined with the other four under the Blackshard, at the top of a mountain now grown taller than ever by the leylines.
The realm was isolated from any outside intruders. The multiverse went through many catastrophes, from Phyrexians, to Urza, to Eldrazi, to Nicol Bolas, to Phyrexians.
The survivors of the Leyline war were scattered in the embers of a shattering apocalypse, cut off from their magic and forced to work harder than any of their ancestors ever had to rebuild society.
The people of this plane forgot there ever was such a thing as magic, and their archaeologists regarded the massive artifacts under the soil as merely resembling machines, but never functioning as more than complex standing stones.
There was one phenomenon that was still known as magic. Every so often, individuals in times of great emotional weight would simply vanish in a burst of light. They couldn’t know that these people were igniting their sparks, and cast away into the multiverse unable to return.
Society at large was prosperous, as skyscrapers rose from the earth and great advances in science replicated the marvels once thought to be the realm of magic and whimsy. With the invention of space-flight came the first journey to the fabled mountain that records said destroyed the world in an eruption 3000 years ago.
The spacefarer could never have imagined what they found up there. The castle floating in the sky. They couldn’t get inside, and after gathering as much as they could, they flew back down to the plane’s surface. Leaving behind their landing legs, and breaking the natural flow from the green leyline into the ritual.
Magic began returning to the natural world, but there was so much less in the world that was natural, few noticed it at first. Then the decedents of the elves who lived deepest in nature began to awaken.
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